How to use TaskPaper for GTD

Mike Chen

Follow

Jun 14, 2015 · 5 min read

I’ve shifted from Things to TaskPaper for a month and a half now, so I thought I’d share my setup and workflow. In this post I take a look at my new GTD workflow, using Clear by Realmac Software to capture tasks on mobile, and my current TaskPaper+TexExpander toolset.

Warning: This post has a lot of GIFs and might chew up your data plan.

I don’t practice “pure” GTD, but throughout the years I’ve just followed the principles behind it and modified it to what makes sense for me. I can summarise my actions into:

• Capture
• Process
• Do
• Review

Keeping track of tasks is only half the story. The main reason for me to continue practicing GTD is to relieve stress. I try to get everything out of my brain instead of keeping everything in my head. It’s for the ease of mind knowing that you have an airtight system that will catch everything that’s going on.

When there are a million and one new inputs happening around you, the last thing you want is a leaky bucket. It’s important to have confidence in your system. Otherwise you’ll always be wondering if you missed something.

So the appeal of GTD for me is having a system I can trust.

January was a super busy period time for me in terms of sales activity, and it was hard keep track of everything I needed to follow up on. I lost trust in my system.

So I went back to basics and used index cards to prototype my new system.

Paper is still the most frictionless way to put thoughts down. Based on how I organised my information, I went looking for tools that will help me in my new workflow.

I played around with TaskPaper and it seemed the most suitable for my workflow.

Capture

The first step in my workflow is capturing information and tasks. On mobile, I primarily used Things app in the past for capturing new tasks. So I looked for the easiest way to key in new tasks.

I ended up using Clear because it’s just so frictionless to enter new tasks.

I also considered Listacular and PlainText. Both apps support the .taskpaper format (it’s just plain text) and syncing via Dropbox. But I think they were too complicated for my liking.

I used to think syncing was important, but I realised it’s not. What I do now is just enter on Clear, then review every morning and see what I want to eliminate or add to my task list.

I can also do a quick entry on my desktop, which is activated with ⌘+Shift+⏎.

When I open TaskPaper, my inbox items are at the top. Some people have an Inbox project, but I thought that was redundant.

Sort

You can quickly sort tasks via keyboard shortcuts. In this example I select two tasks, hit ⌘+\ to open the Move to Project menu, then hit the first letter of the project name I want to move it to.

Drill downs

Drill down via tags

Tags allow us to drill down to dates or people. If I’m meeting Yoda, I get a good view of all the things I need to do related to him. Useful for meeting agendas.

Drill Downs by Project

Another feature I find useful is to drill down by project so I can focus my current attention on that. You can do this by clicking the handle next to the project title. You can also use the ⌘+L shortcut.

Scheduling using TextExpander Snippets

Finally, to solve the problem of due dates or things I have to do in the future, I use a combination of TextExpander snippets and TaskPaper’s boolean operations.

You can skip to the good stuff and download my TextExpander snippets here.

I can add a due date through shortcuts I set up. If the task is due today, I type ;0 and TextExpander automatically expands that to @due(%Y-%m-%d), where %Y-%m-%d are variables that pull out the current system date.

I have a few TextExpander different shortcuts set up for different due dates:

I also have shortcuts for dates like Due Next Coming Fri. Super useful when planning for the following week. Here’s the TextExpander script: (via @drdrang)

set theDate to (current date) + 1 * days 
repeat until weekday of theDate = Friday 
    set theDate to theDate + 1 * days 
end repeat 
set theDate to "@due(" & year of theDate & "-" & (text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (month of theDate as integer))) & "-" & (text -2 thru -1 of ("0" & (day of theDate as integer))) & ")"as string

Need one for Mon-Thurs? Just change Friday to the day of the week you need.

I can view the tasks due today via the following TextExpander snippets:

@today or @due <= %Y-%m-%d and not project Archive +d

So what this does is tell TaskPaper to:

1. Show me tasks tagged with @today (TaskPaper has a ⌘+Y shortcut for that by default)
2. Show me tasks or due today or earlier (will show overdue tasks)
3. Don’t show me archived projects
4. Show me descendants (sub-tasks)

And here it is in action (watch the search field):

To get an idea of my tasks due this week, I’ve also set up the following snippet:

@today or @thisweek or @due <= %@+7D%Y-%m-%d and not project Archive +d

This shows tasks due up to seven days in advance.

Download my TextExpander snippets here.

More links

• Size Matters — The TaskPaper theme I’m using. I installed Solarized Dark for the Mac colour picker and customised the colour palette from there.
• Meeting Notes, Date Math And TextExpander — simplicitybliss.com
• Text Expander Snippetes: Date and Time — David Sparks

Originally published at slidbook.com on April 3, 2015.